hey folks, quick update to say you’ve probably noticed our new community icons.

these icons were lovingly crafted by @UrLogicFails@beehaw.org, who posted them a couple of days ago over in Creative. we took notice of them and obviously–because they’re our community icons now–really, really liked them.

thanks to his generosity in working things out with us, we’re pleased to announce we can use his icons under a Creative Commons license for the site! until further notice they’ll be our site icons, with credit to him on our sidebars. we’ll also be adding attribution to the community sidebars over the rest of day as time permits.

we’re also pleased to report that, thanks to your generosity, we’ve been able to reasonably compensate him for all 33 of the icons he’s made for the community! the agreed to rate is $5 per icon, for a total of $165 that’s been paid out to him as of today. this expense has been reflected on our Open Collective. (we’ve also agreed to, as possible, commission him for any future community icons until further notice, which will be subject to that same rate.)

hopefully you enjoy the new icons, and please thank UrLogicFails for the work here! thanks for using the site again folks!

  •  alyaza [they/she]   ( @alyaza@beehaw.org ) OPEnglish
    6•1 year ago

    on this specific point (we’re tackling the other, will report back on that one later–the previous icon for that community was one i didn’t make so even if i wanted to i literally couldn’t speak on it like i can with most of our previous ones lol):

    I think the color palette of the community icons shouldn’t be restricted to only black and yellow, that makes everything “scream” as that is usually a color combination used to express a warning or announcement. I’m no graphic designer by trade, but I think colors should be used as a distinguishing feature between the instances commmunities, and less dramatic colors, so to speak. Having the icons have a hexagon shape should be enough to recognize them as Beehaw-communities, even if they have different color schemes.

    aesthetics are not really a big consideration for us in general, because we’re very much in function over form mode right now.

    but, when the subject needs to be broached, we want to do that right. in this case we have to account for a lot of things with aesthetics here, including but not limited to:

    • how our website is branded already and how to make it all mesh (bee theming has pretty specific associated colors);
    • how to make things work for all lemmy themes (there are several we have to make all the icons work with);
    • how to make them look good against each other (which is ultimately a consideration with no objective answers, so there’s no way to please everyone);
    • and how to make them as accessible and as unambiguous as possible for everybody within the constraints of those other points (which further limits the range of color choices we can work with; we also have to work with the accessibility limitations of the platform, which are numerous here to say the least.)

    all this to say: there’s really just not much wiggle room we have with the icons and their colors given those considerations, and there are other factors i’m no doubt failing to mention too. our previous icons were dichromatic black on white and very utilitarian/minimalist for a reason, and likewise these are pretty minimalist too.

    there’s also the consideration we’d now be asking someone to rip up all their work and basically start over, which we’re pretty hesitant to do–not only because we’ve already paid them, but because the simple reality is we can’t please everyone and i have no doubts we’d get similar critiques with more new icons and/or introduce new problems. at some point we just have to go with something and iterate on it, and as far as i’m concerned these kinds of critiques of the icons i can live with.